Alexander Keller
Faculty of Computer Science, Munich University of Technology
Oettingenstr. 67, 80538 Munich, Germany
E-Mail: kellera@in.tum.de, Phone: ++49-89-2178-2167
The increasing acceptance of CORBA for implementing distributed applications yields the opportunity of using this distributed object-oriented communication infrastructure for the management of these applications and the underlying systems as well. It is thus important to supply CORBA-compliant agents which enable the management of these systems in an efficient manner. Currently, this is not the case: While no CORBA-compliant management agents are available on the market, one can easily find a multitude of SNMP agents meeting these demands. Thus, establishing a methodology for obtaining the required CORBA-compliant management agents from already existing modular SNMP agents serves as a case-study on how to transfer legacy code into new computing environments. This paper describes a methodology for migrating already existing modular SNMP agent code into a CORBA environment and describes its application to a concrete example, an agent for managing UNIX workstations. This agent has been developed by our research group and is extensively used. In addition, we concentrate on how the transformation overhead can be minimized by deploying standardized translation algorithms and state-of-the-art software development tools.
Keywords: CORBA, Distributed Objects, Distributed Systems Management, Legacy Systems